Volume 1 Issue 3

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The thought of murdering John Crowe Ransom had never entered his mind until the moment he found himself standing by the busy street next to the old Fugitive, holding a shoe box with a dead cat in it and wondering whether he could afford a beer at the Blue Dog Saloon. He did have a few things against the old coot, but none of them justified homicide, he reflected, as he shifted his grip on the cat box and on his sanity and shook his head to clear it of murderous devils telling him to push the great man out in front of a double-cab pickup labeled Bogart Paint Company, which was full of the usual rabble of hungover painters and their “helpers,” one of whom stuck his scrawny neck out of the truck window and yelled “Get a job!” so furiously that his Clemson Tigers baseball cap nearly flew off in College Avenue.

“Heh heh heh,” John Crowe chuckled. “Some of us must look unemployed.” At that moment, pitying him, Billy Echols cancelled his impulse to initiate a fatality. He had been recruited for this lunch by a well-meaning senior faculty member who had been unable to find, on short notice, any other graduate students who sounded Southern. God knows you can’t take a great Southern thinker to lunch in Athens, Georgia, with a bunch of fucking carpetbaggers. A black student was frowning at some mail in the main office, but you can never tell about those old moonlight and magnolia types (he might never have had lunch with an African-American person before), so some safer plan was gestating feebly when young Echols stumbled in to the office clutching with some anxiety a Hush Puppies box sealed with duct tape. Aha, a Godsend, thought the senior faculty member. They can talk about hush puppy recipes together. Billy usually didn’t carry dead cats around with him, but as he was dashing out the door to class that morning, cursing himself for being on schedule to get there five minutes late, he encountered his neighbor, whose long face was shortly explained by his seizing Billy’s arm and whispering, “Bad news, Billy. Your cat got run over. You might want to pick her up before the kids see her.” With the still-warm cat folded respectfully and as mournfully as possible under the circumstances into the first handy box, Billy taped it shut, envisioning placement of the ill-fated corpse in the very respectable Park Hall dumpster not far from his office. As he loped down the hall at school, though, he realized that he was going to have to pass the open door of his classroom and that he was already ten minutes late. He turned on a dime into the room, set the shoebox on the desk, and taught “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” noticing some catlike curiosity in the glances directed at the box. “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light,” he shrieked, hoping that the cat could hear him in heaven but feeling also a simultaneous terror lest she rise from the dead and emerge ferociously from the box yowling and clawing. She had not had her rabies shot this year, and he could see himself being led in handcuffs to a car by the university police, and he envisioned the inevitable television interview featuring his department chair: “Well, we knew the boy was kind of useless and had absolutely no future in the profession. Drank too much and made sarcastic remarks in his class papers. We thought he might get a job in the post office or someplace he wouldn’t do any harm. We knew he was pretty sorry, but, my God, my God, we never anticipated anything like this.” He posed tragically after the final period of the poem and was rewarded by a brief stillness in the room. “For tomorrow, read Wallace Stevens’ ‘Sunday Morning.’ Questions?” Foolishly checking his mailbox afterward instead of consigning the remains to their planned resting place, Billy was nailed by Dr. Tony Teppich, his ex-girlfriend’s major professor, whose disapprobation was devoutly to be avoided and who evidently needed a warm body to go to lunch with John Crowe Ransom, who had been lured to campus to give an overpaid lecture on Allen Tate. Billy was aware that for the rest of his life he would have the remarkable privilege of being able to lie with impunity about whatever Ransom might say at lunch, e.g., “But Ransom told me personally that he thought T. S. Eliot was not one tenth as talented, poetically speaking, as Byron Herbert Reece,” but the timing was not good. It was always possible that the cat might come back to life, an event that might even give the old gentleman a heart attack. It might be worse to stop a Fugitive’s clock with a resurrected cat than to push him in front of a painter’s truck. The cat would spill beer everywhere and raise pure holy hell in the Blue Dog Saloon. Or he might drop the box, and the dead cat would roll out looking pathetic and victimized, perhaps lifting her head, opening one cold eye and raising a paw feebly to point at him, saying, “That’s the man, y’all. Billy Echols done it,” before gasping her last and falling tragically back to the floor. Billy could see himself screaming and writhing as they strapped him into Old Sparky at Reidsville, with the grinning face of Lester Maddox watching him through the spectators’ window, “Five, Four, Three, Two…” In the Blue Dog, things looked comfortable, and the smell of pizza carried an invigorating challenge. The three academics occupied a booth, and, thanks to Dr. Teppich’s considerable girth, Billy found himself, the dead cat, and Mr. Ransom with one side to themselves. “And what did you teach today, Mr. Echols?” Ransom inquired with smooth courtesy, keeping his eyes off the Hush Puppies box. Billy nearly panicked, having just quaffed a large mug of beer with a speed unusual even for him. If I say Dylan Thomas, he’ll think I’m an alcoholic, he thought. “It was ‘A Rose for Emily,’” he eventually choked out. “And how was the discussion?” Ransom murmured amiably, with a growing inquisitorial gleam in his eye. The cat toying with the mouse, thought Billy, refilling his mug with studied deliberation and false apathy. “Well, we did some number crunching with the temporal references in the story, and I tried to make the case that a hidden theme of the story is that Miss Emily was born in the Confederacy. So she doesn’t have to obey the regular rules.” “You do sound like a Southern critic. But do all the references to time support your theory?” Trapped, thought Billy. “No, sir, there’s a discrepancy. But possibly it goes along with other evidence to suggest that you can’t trust the narrator.” Ransom looked at him with benevolent disdain. “I’m glad to hear that this kind of discussion is still going on down here in Georgia. This is a composition class, right, Tony?” “Our Comp Two class is also an intro to literature. Our teaching assistants get into all kinds of things.” He looked upward at a slight angle. “Where are you in your doctoral program, Billy?” Up Shit Creek, thought Billy, but he gathered himself. “Well, I’m switching from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, with most of my coursework done. There were some faculty changes, and I still have some issues to lay to rest.” “The way you were talking about Faulkner, I’d have thought you were working in the literature of the South.” “I have to admit I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get out of the South, Mr. Ransom.” Ransom smiled. “Keep trying, Billy. But there’s no escape. We’re taped inside the South like that shoe box you’ve got. We’ll never get out alive.” “I can live with not escaping, but I can’t live without trying to escape.” “I can’t blame you altogether. But there are more important things. Dr. Teppich, I want y’all to make this young man into a fine scholar. He’s going in a good direction, I believe.” Billy suddenly felt an intense fear that at this high point of his academic career there was no way the cat could stay dead. He glanced quickly at the box and stuck his hand out toward the great man and said he had to be somewhere. Teppich had already announced that he would pay the tab, so the escape route seemed open. Billy very carefully picked up the Hush Puppies box, gave the ghost of a bow to the Confederacy, and marched stiffly toward the door, College Avenue, and the shadowy greenness of the great silent vacuum of the Park Hall dumpster.

R. W. Haynes is a professor at a South Texas university. He writes poetry, stories, and plays, as well as literary criticism. His main academic project at this time is a second book on the remarkable Texas playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote.

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